article via newsone.com
On Wednesday, Congressional leaders honored the “Foot Soldiers” of the Selma to Montgomery Marches in 1965 with the nation’s highest civilian award, the Congressional Gold Medal.
Anecdotally, Paul Ryan – Speaker of the House of Representatives, who also spoke during the ceremony and praised the foot soldiers for their part in the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 – will not act on a bill to restore the Voting Rights Act that was essentially gutted by the Supreme Court nearly two years ago.
The ceremony, held in the U.S. Capitol’s Emancipation Hall, featured speeches by Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ), Rep. John Lewis (D-GA), and Rev. Frederick D. Reese, the former president of the Dallas County Voters League.
Thursday morning, Congresswoman Terri Sewell (D-AL), who introduced the bill to honor the foot soldiers; Charles Mauldin, former president of the Student Movement; and Joyce O’Neal, a member of the Student Movement, joined Roland Martin on NewsOne Now to discuss the award.
Rep. Sewell told Martin, “Yesterday was about making sure this nation’s history is righting a wrong, they (the foot soldiers) should be given all of the credit [for] forcing this nation to live up to its ideals of equality and justice for all.”
Congresswoman Sewell continued, “I think it’s up to us, this generation and future generations, to continue the fight,”because there is so much more needed to be done to “strengthen the Voting Rights Act.”
In reflecting on yesterday’s ceremony, Mauldin thanked Congresswoman Sewell for introducing the bill and said, “This is probably the first time in about 51 years in my being involved in things that we’ve gotten recognition” from government officials.
He added, “We are certainly invited to the protests to demonstrate, but seldomly invited to the celebration. This is the first time that people like us have been invited to the celebration.”
To read more, go to: http://newsone.com/3359436/selma-foot-soldiers-receive-the-congressional-gold-medal/
Posts tagged as “Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.”
On February 6, 1964, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke at the New School in New York City. It was the first of 15 talks given by civil rights leaders that semester as part of the American Race Crisis Lecture Series. The King lecture was entitled “The Summer of Our Discontent.” The talk was later revised and expanded in King’s 1964 book Why We Can’t Wait.
The New School archives contain a tape of a question and answer period that followed Dr. King’s address but did not include a recording of the actual speech.
Recently, a reel-to-reel tape was found at the student radio station at Amherst College in Massachusetts that indicated it was Dr. King’s New School speech. Not wanting to risk damaging the tape by playing it, the college had the recording digitized. It turned out the reel had been accurately labeled.
The speech had been rebroadcast on the college radio station on December 8, 1964 as part of a weekly program of pre-recorded lectures, some given at Amherst College and some obtained through arrangements with other institutions. The King recording is one of 46 open reel audio tapes transferred to the Amherst College Archives and Special Collections by the radio station in 1989.
The recording has now been made available to the public. You may listen to the speech here. A transcript of the address can be read here.
article via jbhe.com